When I was in college in the early 90s, unix systems were nonstop-paging quite often, and lisp systems would frequently pause while you were interacting with them, for nontrivial amounts of time, like multiple seconds.
And that was the 90s, after Lisp had been around for decades...
That's why my university had a site license of Allegro CL for its SUN SPARC cluster. Thus every student had access to a useful Allegro CL installation.
above the 90s were mentioned. SPARC systems shipped in the late 80s, 87something. At that time (90s) Lisp systems on stock hardware had already quite useable GCs, especially the big three commercial CL implementations on Unix (Lucid, Allegro and Lispworks). Even MCL on Mac OS had a useful ephemeral GC.
It's hard to say how many time was spent on GC in a Lisp program in the 70s. The installations were different, programs were different. How much time did a Multics Emacs written in Maclisp spend in GC? I have no idea. A macsyma running for some hours? AN early rule based system? Probably there were taken some benchmark numbers, but one would need check the literature to find them.
There are also pathological cases where Memory is mostly full and time would be spent mostly in GC, or where a lot of virtual memory is used, and much time is spent in IO paging in/out memory.
Note also that the invention of generational GCs was triggered by the availability of larger virtual memory based systems and the programs using it - available to the market outside of the original research. Before that, most of them were quite a bit smaller or very rare. Systems like the Symbolics 3600 were extremely rare and expensive. When they first shipped, GCs were copying and compacting, but not generational. Systems like that did not exist on the market before.
But come on, I have used emacs for 25 years, and on a daily basis it stalls for annoying amounts of time while I am just doing something simple like editing a .cpp file. Today. In the year 2017.